Pauline Oliveros ~ Tara’s Room
The sound of the
accordion is probably most often associated with European folk music or the
plangent tones of Argentinian tango. However the 72 year old American composer
Pauline Oliveros has opened up new vistas for the instrument. The Beauty Of
Sorrow features Oliveros playing an accordion tuned to just intonation (the
system also used by the likes of LaMonte Young and Harry Partch) and fed through
delay processors. The resulting 25 minute piece consists of long drawn out
tones that insinuate themselves into the environment. Such is their patient
duration that they appear to form a second, musical structure within the physical
one in which the music is heard. The shape of this sonic space suggests the
coolness of Appalachian mountain air or the vibration of power cables in desert
winds, rather than anything as mundane as, say, domestic architecture. The
liner notes for this piece inform the reader that it “is intended to
assist the listener in connecting and relaxing with deep feelings” and
Oliveros’s piece ably achieves its aim. The title track that follows
“is an invocation for wisdom especially during an unfamiliar journey”.
In fact the unfamiliar journey may just be the music itself which is a strange,
lengthy beast, measured out in groans, chants and rattles. It might equally
serve as saturnine rite to the drone god of deepest night as soundtrack to
a trip for a job interview. Oliveros is again the sole performer whose spoken
mantra opens out kaleidoscopically against a backdrop of electronic percussion
and spooked flute wooshes. Subtitled ‘Two Meditations On Transition
And Change’, both pieces bear a remarkable sense of contemplative suspension
and Tara’s Room in particular is strikingly odd.
Colin Buttimer
February 2005